Q: In your book, you write about how you made frequent
visits to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., as a child. How did
that affect your interest in writing about space travel?

A: As a child, I wasn't particularly engaged with what I was
seeing at the museum. I think sometimes the things that are most remarkable to
adults are just accepted by kids, who have no frame of reference, as normal. I
did have a sense that what was on display there was special somehow, though,
even if I couldn't quite put my finger on why.

As I grew older and gained more of a sense of history I was
able to put the history of spaceflight into more of a context and could start
to see how remarkable it was.

Q: You write that as you embarked on this project, you
thought, “I want to know, most of all, what it means that we went to space for
fifty years and that we won’t be going anymore.” In the end, what do you think
it means?

A: It's true that I kept asking this question, and I often
worried I would never find an adequate answer.

In the end, I did think I found an answer by sort of turning
the question inside out—the real question is not "Why did we stop?"
but "Why did we start going in the first place?" That turns out to be
the real anomaly, the thing that does not fit any pattern of history.

The good news is that now that we've done it, it's changed
who we are, and maybe that will make us want to go again.

Q: What do you see as the most important differences between
the “heroic era” of spaceflight and the “shuttle era,” and what do you see
looking ahead?

A: I think the differences were much more significant to the
public than they were to astronauts, engineers, scientists, and other
spaceworkers inside NASA.

The public seems to have grown tired of the shuttle because
it did the same thing over and over pretty reliably (with some notable
exceptions).

But to the people who worked on it, it was exciting to
develop a spacecraft that could be used over and over for different tasks, some
of which hadn't been dreamt up yet when the shuttle first flew--just as
exciting and innovative as the simpler rockets that first took people into
space.

People want to see spaceflight pushing forward into new
challenges, and hopefully we will find the political will to do that in the
future.

Q: Your book includes your personal reflections and
experiences, as well as the history of the space program. What did you see as
the right blend of the two as you were writing the book?

A: This is something I struggled with throughout, that I
think all writers of creative nonfiction struggle with.

If you put yourself into it too much it feels like you're
being solipsistic, that you're putting yourself in front of your more worthy or
compelling subject.

At the same time, if you leave yourself out too much it can
feel like you aren't fully sharing your true experience, your true
subjectivity.

I hope to strike the right balance where the reader can see
that I am offering my own subjective experience of a thing but without trying
to shove my own face in front of the camera, so to speak.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I've been returning to a novel I started before the end
of the shuttle. It's a very different project--it takes place in Minneapolis in
the ‘90s, during the time when everyone thought the world might end when the
calendar switched over to 2000.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Everyone in the world should, at least once, go outside
at night to see the International Space Station pass overhead. It's easy to
find out when it will be visible where you are by going to spotthestation.nasa.gov.

The first time I heard someone say I should do this, I
thought it sounded boring, but then once I saw it I was hooked. Now I go outside
whenever I can to wave at the astronauts, and I always try to drag people with
me.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).